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Student Housing Software Company To Offer Mobile Apps

By Dian Schaffhauser

08/24/10

An American company that sells software to manage university student housing will be broadening its product line by teaming up with a British firm that sells campus mobile applications. Residential Management Systems, which has applications for managing housing and conferences, performing recruitment, and allowing students to self-select roommates, will be selling and implementing oMbiel's CampusM in North America.

CampusM, first introduced in September 2009, is a set of programs that provides campus users with mobile access to location-based information, enabling them to use their phones to locate car parking; find their way to buildings, lecture halls, residence halls and other university facilities; and locate friends using the Friend Locator in real time. The app, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, also feeds information about university events, pulls up library records, provides a contact directory, feeds news, and sends alerts.

The two companies will offer versions of Residential Management's applications for mobile use. According to Andrew Tanner, vice president of sales, a mobile app for conferences will allow an organization to set up a delegate list, define the agenda, create announcements, do alerts, add to social networking sites, and allow delegates to communicate with each other, read alerts, and do on-site voting, among other functions. A mobile app for recruitment is intended for recruiters out in the field to manage leads. The mobile app for housing will allow students to interact with their school's residence life office, see their room assignment, apply for housing, monitor laundry, and view their school banking account. He said that developers are currently working on new functionality for that app that would allow students to report maintenance issues and view floor plans for available rooms.

According to oMbiel, an application takes about four weeks to customize and deploy for a given higher ed customer, which Residential Management will be doing. Tanner added that customers for the mobile apps won't have to run the full-fledged applications to be able to use them.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at dian@dischaffhauser.com or on Twitter @schaffhauser.